


Dublin

by butwordsarewind (sungabraverday)



Series: Cities Headcanons [2]
Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types, Paris Burning (thecitysmith)
Genre: Cities, Gen, Personification
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-11
Updated: 2013-06-11
Packaged: 2017-12-14 16:05:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,221
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/838765
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sungabraverday/pseuds/butwordsarewind
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dublin copes by writing and hoping. He's had a lot to cope with over the years, but now the hope seems to finally be paying off.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dublin

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Paris Burning](https://archiveofourown.org/works/825130) by [thecitysmith](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thecitysmith/pseuds/thecitysmith). 



> “For myself, I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world.” - James Joyce 

Sometimes when it becomes too much to hold it all within him, Dublin picks up his pen and puts it to paper. He writes, words spilling out, the thoughts and feelings of the citizens that he can feel in his heart and in his mind, every second of every day. It is easy to write. There are more words than he could possibly write, but if he focuses, very closely, on just one person for just one minute, then the pages fill with it before his hand gives way. 

He doesn’t even try to make sense of it until he is drowning in pages and scraps of words and thoughts. It is impossible to edit when there is so much more that needs written. When at last he fears that so much paper might create a fire hazard, he bundles the pages into packages and deposits them on a variety of rubbish heaps and sidewalks.

He feels a young man pick up one of the bundles before he’s even finished dumping them. 

But the man does something that Dublin had never expected, and he reads them. He reads them, and then he draws from them, liberally, from their thoughts and their actions and he takes people who have never met and he strings them into a single narrative, a narrative that Dublin had never dreamed was there, and he writes them. 

And James Joyce becomes famous for his work. 

Dublin knocks on the young man’s door, and tells him the truth. Dublin agrees to give him the pieces, he agrees to never tell, and they both know the truth. It is enough for him right now, that this one man understands what he is really doing. This man, he polishes the pieces, puts them together in a way that the human mind can fathom, and tries to understand something larger than himself. 

It doesn’t take long before the world is imitating his writing style, but Dublin knows: they don’t understand. They can’t capture the precise feelings and flow. Only the Cities can know that all-encompassing stream of consciousness, and Joyce can only get quite so close because he is listening not to the echo chamber but to the voice of someone who genuinely knows.

Eventually it’s London who shows up on his doorstep and tells him that he needs to stop this madness and grow up. He’s a Capital now, and he has to act like it. Dublin graciously doesn’t point out what they both know - that being a Capital is only likely to make matters worse for him, and he needs the coping mechanism more than ever. 

He’s right, of course. As much as his people have been fighting in the streets before, and as much as that was devastating, it’s not over yet, and he’s growing older than feels fair. There’s been too much blood shed in his country’s name, in his streets. His people are always fighting. Fighting against England, or fighting for it. Fighting amongst themselves when other places don’t want to participate. They fight with words, with statues, with street names.

So he goes to ground, as best as he can. 

No one ever looks at another thirty-something working-class man, rough on the edges but rich with wit, when he goes and orders a pint or two in a pub. Dublin orders the thick black stout they brew at St. James’s Gate, then moves on to the next bar. His land is full of them, on streets as twisted as a drunken man’s walk. This is his city: he made it this way.

Sometimes he thinks they recognise him, sees it in the flashes in their eyes, and that’s when he moves on. He doesn’t want them to notice him. He is no one.

If they recognised him then they would try to convert him into a symbol for whichever side they support. He won’t allow it. He won’t become that. He is a City, and Cities do not intervene, not in the affairs of the humans. So his people fight and kill and die for him, and he drinks himself into a stupor.

No one even blinks an eye when he turns up knackered on the banks of the Grand Canal, just one more example of the well-deserved drunken Irish stereotype.

But Dublin is proud of his people. No matter how much their fighting breaks his heart, there are always more of them who just keep on going. He tries to tell them as best he can how much he appreciates them, but it comes in scattered bits and pieces and a neatly dressed man who looks nothing like him, with all the pock-marked scars from repeated bombings covered by his sleeves, speaking on little platforms, words dropped into newspapers and plays and anywhere he can find someone to deliver them, and then he disappears into the woodwork once more.

Okay, maybe he intervenes. And he encourages the other Cities to do the same, to get all of the people to stop fighting and stop killing each other, because it’s not worth it. It’s easiest to get Belfast to agree. She’s tired of it and she’s grown old now, no longer the belle of her favourite ditty. The rest are less easily swayed, with Corcaigh kicking up the biggest fuss, muttering about how he’s the real Capital city dammit, but they are persuaded - it still hurts to feel their people die.

They finally persuade some of the leaders to talk, but in the end, it’s only the wear and tear of years of war on not just the Cities but on the people that brings it to an end.

There used to be a pillar in the middle of O’Connell Street, a statue remembering some English admiral that had no right to be recognized in a city he did not call home. No one cared for it, least of all him, but it stung a bit when the republicans blew it up, and it stung even more when the army tried to fragment the rest of it and instead blew out the windows down his grandest street. 

It takes years, but they replace it with a spire, a tall thin thing that means nothing to anyone, but doesn’t offend anyone either. Dublin’s there at the inauguration, to remind them all that this is peace. It is not glamorous or exciting, but it is pretty and clean and nobody dies, and “as long as this stands”, he says in a moving speech, “I promise you that I will stay with you and I will help you, and we will find a way through the enmity to a brighter future where we will not fight on these streets anymore.”

He still has a bullet hole in his chest that marks the 1916 Easter Rising, and it will never heal while locals can spot the holes in the statue of O’Connell. He will never forget, and he has pages and pages of remembrances that no one will ever see. But he would like his people to forgive, and he thinks at last that they might be.


End file.
